Victor Davis Hanson: Why All the Wounded Fawns?

[Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.]

Why are charges of racism and political extremism suddenly in the air?

Party politics is always the norm, but what is unusual this time around is the juxtaposition between the once-soaring Obama unity rhetoric of the past and the hardball Chicago politics of the present, amid a landscape of feigned outrage that somehow politics are not "fair." A bit of history is in order.

Like it or not, throughout much of the Bush administration, the public was conditioned to believe the following:

• Filibusters were a key traditional Senate protection designed to thwart the tyranny of the majority as embodied by the Bush-Cheney steamroller (Republicans, to be fair, often damned them as obstructionist).
• Recess appointments were the desperate acts of an executive without confidence in either popular or legislative support. Popular protests were grass-roots democracy at its finest....

In other words, apparently few on the Left realized that in their dislike for Bush, and in their tolerance for those who hated Bush, they more or less changed attitudes toward acceptable and unacceptable public expressions of dissent. So now the public sees their sudden call for polite discourse as abject hypocrisy. Even the toxic and increasingly desperate charge of racism has little currency now, and soon will boomerang back on the accusers....